ESSAYSTIC DIRECTIONS IN PANAIT CERNA’S STUDIES
ESSAYSTIC DIRECTIONS IN PANAIT CERNA’S STUDIES

Summary/Abstract: According to the notion that the essay does not only addresses availability for communication but primarily availability for knowledge, Panait Cerna is among the theorists for whom true poetic creation is based on the expression of elevated ideas in harmony with the poet's inner feelings. Although in the structuring of the essay criticism becomes its fundamental position, Cerna presents the poetical thinking in relation with the poet's position towards his ideas in terms of the thorough poetry knowledge of the great German classics like Schiller and Goethe, the English poets Shelly and Byron and Hugo's work. Through the "Theory of Ideas," a doctoral thesis under the guidance of the great aesthetician Johannes Volkelt, the studies on Eminescu and Faust and the comparative study Eminescu-Lenau, though unfinished, Panait Cerna convinces by his reasoning that poetry presents itself in a dichotomical structure: a prefigured symbolical poetry and one which directly presents its poetical ideas. As a result, Panait Cerna is considered to be among the first ones to predict an absolute return of discourses into a new reorganization in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time, the skills of a specialist could make the discourse fluctuate, even within the same text.

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